Yolanda > Recent Status Updates

This is meant to be a guide you dip in and out of (which I have also done) so people might be surprised at me also ploughing through it like a normal factual book. To be blunt, though, there is enough of whisky history and distilling information included that one can do that. So far it's helped me get a lot more out of a trip to Ireland and try some new single malts.

....I think people don't want to read such books because they consider that I only like them because of my connections to the country (in this case there'd also be the fact of my trusty yellow Merida bike, its design not unlike the Lucky Midwife, that carried me round the island.)

Actually this is just a good book. You don't have to know Taiwan to like it. Read it.

So far, my opinion on this book:

If you like the novels of Umberto Eco (who is referenced in the novel) - read it.
If you like Joyce, Winterson, Murakami, or any other novelist who uses experimental styles - read it.
If you know anything about WW2 history - read it.

I don't have a lot of luck getting people to read things I like which relate to Taiwan, continued in next comment...

I put off reading this because, when it was published, I felt strongarmed into reading either about Iraq or Afghanistan by glaring twits at dinner parties. Now I feel free to read it and am shocked about how positively it was received by some. The novel is brilliant. But the truths it tells about racism against Hazaras, and Nazi influence on Islamists' thinking, surely can't have sat well with dinner party moralists.

Interesting seeing the apparent chaos that struck the party at points: I've also read Nick Cohen's analysis of this period in New Labour's governance, and Blair's own view, so feel I have a broadish picture of how the land lay. I remain fascinated by Dr Liam Fox. This guy saved a baby on my flight to HK. He comes across as keen on privatisation... find myself wondering who the 'real' Liam is

and this is more closely starting to resemble a political history of my childhood and teens. Hindsight is 20-20, and it's astonishing to me when I see the ways in which the Conservative Party screwed up. There are instances here of the tail wagging the dog in terms of activists' desires being assumed and pandered to; also, the anatomy of the leadership elections is startling.

I find the term 'the rubber chicken circuit' hilarious.

Also, some people's fantastical ideas about how dining clubs work would be dispelled by reading this book.